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The market for essay writing seems to be heating up, judging by the spam comments that we’re blocking at Best SEO Blog and SEO Theory. For a few weeks I have found myself marking various off-topic comments as spam on both blogs.

Many of the email accounts associated with these comments are from Gmail.com, one of the worst sources of forum and blog spam at the present time. Google, of course, claims it works hard to find these accounts and disable them but they apparently are being created by contractors and/or firms in India, Pakistan, and Malaysia (and probably a few other countries where labor is inexpensive by U.S. and European standards).

The powers behind this particular essay campaign appear to be based in Canada, although I cannot be 100% certain of that. The domain receiving the links is quality-papers.com, which appears to be using a standard Wordpress template that would have been quick to set up.

Terms the comment spammers are targeting include “classification essay writing”, “essay writing service”, and other variations on “essay writing”. These essay writing spam links don’t see the light of day on our blogs but I am sure they have slammed past many bloggers’ defenses (assuming they all have defenses).

A quick check of quality-papers.com’s link profile as reported by Yahoo! Site Explorer indicates there may be as many as 91,000 links pointing to the domain (many of them appear to be site-wide links). I have no interest in validating that link data. I’m pretty sure someone is conducting a huge, massive link spam campaign on behalf of the domain.

When I look at the various queries that quality-papers.com is being targeted for, it doesn’t rank all that well. Take “classification essay writing”, for example. It appears that quality-papers.com is ranking around the 10th position.

The top-ranked site for “classification essay writing”, essayinfo.com, appears to have fewer than 2,000 reported inbound links. Like many of the sites involved in this query space, essayinfo.com appears to be anonymously registered, so tracking down the owner would be a challenge (although you might be surprised to learn there are ways to track down some of these anonymous registrants).

Essayinfo.com is a made-for-advertising site. Quality-papers.com appears to have neither advertising nor outbound links. For a site that has been online since at least December 2008, that’s a very suspicious signal.

The articles you’ll find on quality-papers.com are the nondescript kind which are commonly found in the affiliate marketing industry. They appear to have been written by low-quality overseas contract writers. I could be wrong. They could be scraped or original content written by the owner.

Normally, I would not care about a site like this. The fact it keeps popping into our comment streams, however, is annoying. Besides, I needed to write an article today and this seemed like a good topic.

If I had to guess what its purpose is, I would suggest that quality-papers.com is trying to get in someone’s way. I would guess that the owner probably wants to position the site highly enough that one of the major competitors in the industry will make a bid for it.

In some affiliate marketing verticals Websites can change hands for as much as several million dollars (US). It depends on whether the real money-makers — the people selling the goods or services — conclude that it would be cheaper to take possession of the domain than to pay the affiliate marketer commissions.

When there is no advertising on a site that gets in a marketer’s way, the site may be looking for bidders, as any marketer who fails to capture significant market share in these highly competitive verticals stands to lose a lot of potential revenue.

Of course, quality-papers.com could be serving other purposes. For example, it could be a spam test site. The spammer might be trying to see how effective his linking resources are. If we assume for the sake of discussion that all the “essay writing” queries resemble those I have given a cursory examination, then it would seem that high numbers of links are not winning the game.

In other words, our spammer appears to be relying mostly on low-value or no-value links. The links may be easy to acquire but they don’t seem to be helping much.

And there could be other, more (or less) nefarious reasons for attempting to rank an unmonetized site in a competitive query space. For example, maybe someone just wants to showcase the “value” of their essay writing service (hosted on another domain) to prospective clients.

Showcase sites are useful but if someone is touting the search engine value of their custom essays, people who buy that content should be sure to do a little bit of research. Make sure you understand the queries in which the essays are being promoted. That means looking at who is ranking, what they seem to be trying to accomplish, and how they are ranking.

We don’t know how much of a factor backlinks are in the essay writing vertical (probably not nearly as much as many SEOs would assume). That is, people may be building (or stealing) links in huge volumes, but the majority of the links probably don’t pass value.

Still, the fact that someone would go to the trouble of acquiring almost 100,000 links to an unmonetized domain implies they don’t have much if any faith in the quality of their writing from an SEO perspective.

NOTE: The third-ranked site for “classification essay writing”, custom-essays.org, appears to be catering to the high school and college essay cheating market. Yahoo! reports fewer than 1,000 inbound links for that domain.

Keep in mind that Yahoo! only knows about the links it has found (or thinks it has found). Do not mistake the Yahoo! numbers as an indication of what Google or Bing have found or allow to pass value. Each search engine does its own crawling. Attempts to measure overlap in the major search engines in the past estimated that there is no more than 40-60% overlap in their data.

That means you cannot use any third-party tool (like Yahoo!, Linkscape, Majestic SEO, et. al.) to analyze how links affect the search results in Google (or bing). I used Yahoo! Site Explorer to get a rough idea of who is aggressively building links.

In my experience, the most aggressive link builders tend to be doing SEO the wrong way. That doesn’t mean every site that has 100,000 backlinks is doing SEO the wrong way. If all the players in a vertical have 6-digit backlink profiles, they may be attracting those links naturally or the query spaces may have become hyperoptimized (everyone is building links to compete with everyone — which is the only way to work in a hyperoptimized query).

When a site that cannot rank well has ten-to-fifty times as many links as the sites outranking it, you really have to ask which SEO book, blog, or forum the site promoter has been following.

It just seems to me that someone is going to a lot of trouble to create false value in a site that doesn’t achieve much.

Is that any way you want to optimize for search? Think about it.

What is the difference between a Link Farm and a Blog Farm? Well, if you browse the SEO Theory SEO Glossary you find entries for both “link farms” and “blog farms”.

Blog Farm – Noun phrase. A group of blogs operated by a single person or group that are populated by software, usually RSS-feed scraping scripts. Used for link building, blog farms are created by special software that installs popular blogging software on multiple domains and hosting accounts. Sometimes confused with links farms (q.v.).

Link Farm – Noun phrase. Any group of Web sites where every member site in the group links to every other member site in the group.

Keeping in mind that there is no central authority for deciding which phrases actually mean what, we should accept that people are going to disagree on their definitions from time to time. In particular, academics who publish research on detecting and fighting Web spam often (in my experience, almost always) use terms that were developed by the Web spam community inappropriately. The academic community’s terminology is often adopted by search engineers at the major Websearch services.

Except for the fact that their blog posts may cause the rest of to feel puzzled, the search services are generally perceived as both authoritative and knowledgeable in these matters. For example, Bing search engineers sometimes share their views on Web spam. These posts are quite enlightening but as you can see from the comments I could not refrain from offering what I hope was a gently worded clarification in terminology.

My purpose is to ensure that people see both sides of the discussion, not to sway search engineers to use my terminology. They are dealing with abstractions most people never see. But the confusion over terminology is easily found around the Web. For example, a recent discussion at HighRankings concerned link wheels. Again, I offered a counter-example of how the phrase can be defined (and, in my opinion, how it is properly defined).

I don’t coin most of these expressions. I learn them from other people, watching how they use the terms. Take “link farms”, for example. The earliest link farm I know about would be Brett Tabke’s Buddy Links program, which he put together after I shared my findings on a forum about how I was able to improve my Inktomi stability by using crawl pages on different domains. Link farms became all the rage for several years and they morphed into different types of content.

Some people today ask what is the difference between a link farm and a directory, for example. Some link farms were designed to look and function just like Web directories. There was one popular program that would crawl the Web looking for Websites with reciprocal link pages, add those sites to a custom “directory”, and then send an email to the sites asking for a link back. Clever, right? It eventually led many sites down the golden path to search invisibility through bans and penalties.

Some — but not all — reciprocal link management programs were also link farms. Reciprocal link management services followed several different paths but the earliest one I know of (no longer in existence) grew out of the link farm concept. As the years passed reciprocal linking services became more selective and, according to some of the service providers, less interested in building links for SEO and more interested in building links for traffic and branding.

Search engineers in academia and industry hold an annual conference called AIR Web (AIR = Adversarial Information Retrieval). I am sure they feel they derive a great deal of value from the conferences so I don’t mean to belittle that perceived value.

I have no real idea of what goes on inside a search engineering organization. But I have noticed from the published papers that the research usually deals with spam techniques that are 2-3 years old, if not older. The apparent lag time between the widespread adoption of the latest Web spam techniques and the identification of those techniques by researchers is somewhat concerning to me, but then just because state-of-the-art spammers have moved on from 2007’s tactics doesn’t mean they are irrelevant to today’s Web.

What I find more troubling is that the AIRWeb papers (and other published research) often use definitions of Web spam tactics that are radically different from what the actual spammers use. That doesn’t mean these folks don’t know what they are talking about but it does imply they don’t know what the spammers are talking about — and vice versa. In other words, spam by any other name would still smell as foul (may the Shakespeareans in the audience forgive me for that). Web spam, however, seems to be staying ahead of search technology in part due to the differences in dialect between spammers and search engineers.

This plurality of technical definitions for the same concepts we all run into is very confusing, so it’s no wonder people often “discover” new ideas that are really old ideas. Still, one must also be careful not to judge too quickly.

For example, suppose what the Bing engineers identified as “link farms” in the post I commented on really are NOT blog farms (as I speculate)? The article did not provide enough information for me to be sure of what they were talking about — sure, that is, in terms with which I am familiar and comfortable. The distinctions between artificial Website paradigms blur very, very easily.

For example, you could easily set up a link farm using blog farm software, wherein all the blogs link to each other. You have both a link farm and a blog farm, but neither is the other — conceptually the blog farm should still be distinct (in your abstraction of definitive terminology) from the link farm, even though the instance of both is the same group of Websites.

Only someone as esoteric as I would care about that.

You might ask if the so-called “SEO friendly” Web directories that I have ranted against for years are link farms. Some of them are like link farms in that they required links back from listed sites, but they were still not link farms because they didn’t meet the technical definition of a link farm. That is, the listed sites don’t all link to each other. They just link to the faux Web directories.

People sometimes call these sites Spam Directories but I haven’t really see enough general usage for any one expression to feel justified in including such a term in the SEO Theory glossary. Dictionary editors sometimes wait several years before adding new words or expressions, to see if they really fit into general usage. I suspect we’ll never be able to document a widely used expression for “SEO friendly” spam directories (other than SEO friendly spam directory, but that is a pejorative term used by critics of the sites, not users of the sites).

The diff between link farm and blog farm expression arises from someone’s curiosity about link farms and blog farms. It is, to me, an indication of the widespread interest in Web spam. I am sure there are new faces appearing in the Web spam community all the time. I usually call those folks script kiddies because they often start out using the older tactics (and software) that hard core, experienced black hat spammers have moved on from or downgraded in their strategic arsenals of spam techniques.

This is a hard topic to write for because of all the different uses for common terms, as well as because of the plurality in terminology for common techniques and Web structures. I don’t expect academia and search engineers to suddenly change their vocabularies just to satisfy my ego but if you’re going to study Web spam then you should at the very least be aware that there are different dialects in the discussion.

As Yahoo! transfers its search technology to Microsoft’s Bing platform, if my prediction of brand death for Yahoo! Search is fulfilled, many Websites will find themselves in the same undesirable position I am heading toward: dependence upon Google for search referral traffic.

Many people in the SEO industry have focused almost exclusively on Google search referral traffic to the detriment of their own and their clients’ interests. I can’t do anything about SEO short-sightedness but those of us who have maintained search referral diversity now face a problem of serious magnitude.

Let me illustrate with some personal data from Xenite.Org.

A year ago Xenite was receiving around 3,000 search visitors per month from Yahoo! search. In years previous Yahoo! used to send as many as 10,000 visitors a month but the traffic declined gradually over time. A couple of years ago Yahoo! was sending about 5-6,000 visitors per month.

Part of the decline was due to stale content on Xenite, a topic I’ve discussed in the past. I just don’t have as much time to create content for my science fiction network as I did 10 years ago. But we do still publish new content every now and then, some of it extremely link-worthy (such as a recent interview with Craig Horner, star of Legend of the Seeker, which drew in thousands of visitors).

So I know that Yahoo!’s declining search market health has been a real factor for many people. Nonetheless, I’ve never abandoned looking to Yahoo! for traffic.

Microsoft search, on the other hand, has always been a minor player for me. A year ago Xenite received about 1400 visitors from Live search. There have been times in the past when we’ve received as many as 1800 visitors a month from Microsoft, but I don’t really remember any higher numbers.

Last month Microsoft’s Bing sent about 2,000 search referrals to Xenite. Yahoo! sent about 2500. There has been virtually no growth in the non-Google search traffic as far as these two competitors are concerned. Microsoft is essentially leeching traffic away from Yahoo!. I expect that trend to continue, perhaps to even accelerate.

Our Google traffic is up over the past year, no doubt due in part to the occasional new content that Xenite continues to publish. Google typically sends us between 18,000 and 20,000 search referrals a month (NOTE: Technically, all these services send much more traffic — I’m just using data from the most popular referral URLs to avoid adding up long lists of referral data).

Although our search referral traffic has not exactly flat-lined, I don’t see much opportunity for growth in either Google or Bing. I mean, to increase search referral traffic we’ll have to add more content and, frankly, I don’t have time for that.

Yahoo! search referral traffic is dying so trying to improve my content’s visibility over there makes no sense, especially since they are now on a 2-year plan to phase out their algorithm. As Bing’s referral traffic grows, Xenite will certainly benefit from the diversity.

But what happens if, for some reason, Bing’s algorithm changes in favor of sites that compete with Xenite.Org? That pretty much leaves me stuck with Google.

You may feel good about relying on Google for your search traffic but I don’t.

Admittedly, search referral traffic only plays a minor role in our traffic building strategies. We get a lot of traffic from other sources. Still, I don’t like getting 85% of my search referral traffic from Google. Time was, back when I had time to focus on my own sites, Google drove about 50% of the search referral traffic.

If Google banned Xenite today we’d still get a lot of traffic but no one wants to take a 15-20% hit.

So what to do?

The only really viable search engine out there besides Google and Bing is now Ask. I haven’t tried to optimize for Ask in ages. We rank well at Ask but we don’t get much traffic from Ask.

Search optimization doesn’t just include ranking well in a search result. It also includes building a query space and enhancing a search brand’s visibility.

In other words, through the years, I have often advised people who struggled to match in Google what they were accomplishing with other search engine rankings to market their non-Google search visibility. This is a strategy that works very well, especially for sites that cannot rank in Google at all.

There are ways to promote your Ask search visibility. They can be as simple as telling people to “search Ask.com for Our Brand Name” or as complex as incorporating Ask search into your marketing efforts (keep in mind that Ask is a trademark so you have to be careful about how you refer to it).

Marketing goes well beyond advertising. It includes all your outreach efforts. Every communication between you and your marketplace can include reference to the search engines where you rank well. You can include Ask in those references and also give Ask special prominence in them.

The fact that Ask does a very poor job of marketing itself doesn’t mean no one uses it. Tens of millions of people use Ask search every month. You should make sure your sites are listed in and ranking in Ask. You should also make sure that people know how to find you in Ask.

Your goal should not be to take market share away from Bing for Ask. Your goal should be to increase your visibility to the people who use Ask.

And if you’re not marketing to Microsoft’s search visitors, you need to be doing that, too. I expect my Bing search referral traffic to increase substantially over the next 2 years. You should set a similar expectation for yourself and make sure you don’t do anything to prevent that from happening.

Maybe Google really does control 85% of the search market. I seriously doubt that (most searchers use more than one search engine). It’s easy to optimize for Google if you don’t obsess over links and targeted queries. It seems to be getting easier to optimize for Bing.

If you want to maximize your SEO efforts, then you need to think about ways of cutting inroads into substantial search market audiences you don’t normally reach out to.

Ask is the low-hanging fruit. It will take most of us 6 months to a year to gear up for Ask. In the meantime, we need to be casing the other search services to see who is coming up behind Ask.

Don’t depend on just one search engine. That’s the worst possible SEO philosophy. I’ve been negligent about my own sites but at least I’m still aware of where they get their traffic from. I intend to do something about resetting my search diversity.

What are you going to do for yours?

Web directories have fallen out of favor with the SEO industry because so many of them are constructed as made-for-advertising sites. I don’t see as many directories style themselves as “SEO friendly” as a couple of years ago but there are still hundreds, perhaps thousands of cheap off-the-shelf directory sites that get spammed to death.

A typical in-house SEO or freelance specialist probably cannot justify the work of promoting several small directories but many agencies with 100 or more clients may be able to justify investing about 6 months in building up a small stable of trusted Web directories where they can get client Websites listed quickly.

Here’s the catch: You have to work with niche directories that are not being abused by the rest of the SEO industry.

So how does an SEO agency find the right kinds of directories? Some agencies just build their own small general purpose directories. Some agencies rely on professional or business organization directories (hubs from chamber of commerce sites, city and county business directories, etc.).

That’s not what I’m proposing. What I’m proposing is that you pick 5-10 small directories, take them under your wing, help populate them (with both your own clients and similar but uncompetitive sites), and help promote them.

I’m talking about doing some pro bono work (or, if you can get the directories to sign up as clients, then get them as clients).

Web directories don’t have to be relegated to the slag heap of yesterday’s SEO spam. You can turn them into meaningful resources as long as you can maintain engagement with the directory operator.

Your objective is not to create the next Yahoo! or DMOZ. Your objective is to foster a relationship with a Website that provides a source of reliable linking. One site won’t help much but 5-10 sites can do wonders for a new, small Website or network that needs some link support.

Web directories can and do send traffic to listed sites when they look like they are being maintained. That’s the other catch to this proposal: you can’t build up a directory with a “build it and they will come forever” attitude. You need to make sure the directories you support are going to keep working over the years.

And then help promote them with blog articles, free articles, press releases, and links from other, trusted directories. You don’t have to pay all the fees if the directory owners are willing to buy the quality listings.

A good directory listing will engage with people through social media, too. And now that I’ve written that you know all the spammers are going to set up Twitter and Facebook accounts so that their new listings are pushed out to hordes of content-scraping robots.

It really takes less effort than you think to create a viable Web directory. It just needs to establish itself through sound marketing practice in order to build up traffic and search engine trust. And when you have that reliable group of 5-10 directories that you personally know and trust, your initial round of link-building can get results quickly.

You don’t want or need to submit a Website to 100 or 1500 worthless directories. What you do want and need is to be able to get a Website into all the major search engines quickly. It’s easier to add a target listing to a good directory than it is to go through all that link-begging that most SEOs still engage in.

And speaking of SEOs, there is one more key aspect to this kind of optimization strategy: Under no circumstances should you EVER disclose your list of closely trusted directories to the rest of the SEO community. Let them go out and build their own resources. Protect your hard work.

PageRank Sculpting Is The Badhat SEO Technique From Hell

PageRank Sculpting is one of those really bad concepts that just won’t go away. The PageRank sculpting model falsely suggests that, by hiding internal links from search engines, a Website can improve its search visibility. Since the idea was first proposed in 2007, no one has ever been able to show that it works. In fact, last year Google showed that it does NOT work.

You would think that after seeing Googler Matt Cutts come out and say “[Pagerank sculpting] isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank” people would get the message that PageRank Sculpting IS NOT THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO UTILIZE YOUR PAGERANK.

Nonetheless, some rather surprising people (including but not limited to Rand Fishkin and Eric Enge) have failed to embrace the immediately obvious fact that PageRank sculpting does NOT work. Remember, Matt Cutts told everyone that Google “figured that site owners or people running tests would notice [that PageRank flow affected by "rel='nofollow'" on internal links had changed], but they didn’t.”

Completely Failed SEO Analysis Misled The SEO Industry

All the people claiming they were working miracles through their PageRank sculpting had absolutely no clue for over a year that their “sculpting” had been negated by Google. The reason Google disabled the PR Sculpting “Off Switch” was that “some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites … ended up excluding … high-quality information….”

Based on that absolutely awful analytical record, reasonable people should conclude that SEOs would not be able to hit the broad side of a barn with a baseball bat — even if one helps them swing the bat in the right direction (e.g. Googlers consistently and repeatedly advised people NOT to sculpt PageRank going all the way back to 2007).

You may recall that one of the early and oft-cited justifications for attempting to sculpt PageRank in the first place was that “unimportant pages” were outranking more important pages in search results. Rather than fix this problem, people in the SEO community leaped upon PageRank Sculpting as a hot new idea that would impress the masses — thus creating an even worse problem to mask the original problem.

Proof That PageRank Sculpting Harms Websites Emerges

For months I’ve been monitoring requests for help in various SEO and Google support forums. Many, many Webmasters have come out of the woodwork complaining about lost Google rankings, sites not being indexed, etc. (And additionally dozens of Webmasters have privately asked me to look at their sites through forum-based private messaging.) In nearly every case where I investigated the sites’ structures and backlink profiles I was able to show that at least one of several factors was the probable cause of the Websites’ search invisibility:

• The sites were using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links
• The sites were using “noindex,nofollow” in meta tags
• The sites were using “disallow” in robots.txt
• The sites were using 302-redirects or other odd functions on internal links
• The sites had few or no inbound links
• The sites had obtained many suspicious links (comprising 70% or more of their backlink profiles)

On more than one occasion when I suggested that suspicious backlink problems might be an issue, Google employees tacitly agreed with me without actually saying that was the problem.

By far, however, the most common issue I have found with sites that have lost search traffic, search rankings, and search visibility is that they implemented PageRank Sculpting by use of “rel=’nofollow’” or “noindex,nofollow” meta tags on their pages. By preventing major search engines from crawling and indexing their content, these sites effectively removed themselves from the long tail of search.

How PageRank Sculpting Harms Websites

And by preventing the search engines from indexing all those pages, those sites effectively deleted most of their own accumulated PageRank.

POOF! PageRank vanished simply because it was never allowed to flow through the site, not because it “evaporated” through “rel=’nofollow’”.

Of course link-poor sites don’t have much PageRank to work with in the first place, so preventing unique articles from attracting and passing on PageRank is anything but an effective SEO strategy.

*NEW* PageRank Sculpting Techniques Worse Than The Original

Notice that PageRank sculpting doesn’t simply harm your site through “rel=’nofollow’”. Any method of hiding internal, navigational or cross-promotional links from search engines will reduce a Website’s search visibility and reach. That means that all the NEW methods of “sculpting” PageRank will inflict at least as much harm, if not more, on the Wesbites that implement them.

So using 302-redirects on internal links, embedding navigation into inline frames, using encrypted Javascript links, embedding “noindex” on pages, disallowing robots from directories of user-accessible content — all the so-called “Google-friendly” methods of restricting PageRank flow through a Website (now being promoted by various SEO pundits, gurus, and bloggers) are just as bad and harmful to your site as merely using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links.

The noindex and robots.txt methods pretty much ensure that you are taking a lot of content out of the running, making your site less competitive, less visible, and less likely to draw more traffic.

One Plausible-sounding Variation Does Not Justify Badhat SEO

Rand Fishkin did propose consolidating pages in the hope of combining PageRank into fewer pages. Of all the 2nd-generation PageRank sculpting techniques, this one at least preserves the indexability of content — but then he coupled that idea with the extremely bad and ill-reasoned suggestion that people who have already dropped tons of “nofollows” into their internal navigation links do nothing to fix that problem (to leave the “nofollow” attributes in place).

Remember that SEOmoz has yet to publish a viable, credible test or report that shows they know how to manage PageRank flow (or even just correctly interpret the data they collect). So the recommendation to leave everything in place should be ignored (unless you’d rather just work on other projects). You can still love Rand for being the great guy he is. In fact you should continue to respect him for being the fantastic marketer he is. Keep watching the videos SEOmoz puts out. Just don’t believe them when they say that PageRank Sculpting (still) works because they’ve never been able to show that it does.

(NOTE: In the comments to his blog post cited above, Matt Cutts did say to one questioner: “this is a change that’s been live for well over a year; if you’ve got a site that works for you and you’re happy with, I wouldn’t worry about going back to change a lot of work.” While I understand Matt’s reluctance to offer generic do this/don’t do this advice — I am sure his comment is considered justification for the Do Nothing To Fix The Problem Principle.)

Badhat SEOs Are Compounding Past Errors With New Trouble

PageRank sculpting never fixed the original problem (bad site design) in the first place. All the sites that turned to PageRank Sculpting to resolve that issue simply made their situations worse. They piled one bad design decision on top of another.

Any SEO who cannot get the root URL of a domain to outrank the “About Us” page without blocking crawlers is completely and utterly incompetent, in my opinion. Don’t do business with those people, if the best they can suggest is that you hide internal, navigational links from search engines in order to reduce the PageRank of the “About Us” or other incidental pages.

I noticed with some amusement that certain pro-Sculptors never said another word on the subject after Matt Cutts pulled the rug out from under their snake oil SEO technique last summer. I hope they quietly went back to their clients and got those sites to remove the internalized nofollow code because in my opinion it is professionally irresponsible to leave that kind of “solution” in place.

The real problem lately, however, is that some people continue to talk about PageRank Sculpting as if it works. They clearly are ignoring the memo Google sent out and they are advising other people to ignore it. That is REALLY bad advice.

Goodhat SEOs MUST Disavow PageRank Sculpting

PageRank Sculpting is the process of hiding internal navigation links from search engines. It doesn’t matter whether you do it with “rel=’nofollow’” or “noindex,nofollow” or “disallow” or some screwy Javascript encryption scheme. When you hide internal navigation from a search engine you destroy crawlability, you destroy index visibility, and you deny your content the PageRank it is rightfully entitled to.

Is this really the kind of “optimization” the SEO community wants to be known for? Because if this is the flag YOU want to wave for YOUR SEO expertise, you can count me among the people who consider you to be nothing more than scam artists, snake oil salesmen, charlatans, and amateurs.

It’s time for the SEO community to stop promoting harmful tactics that bring absolutely nothing positive to the table. You can love your friends and conference idols all you want. You can promote their blogs above mine in all the ways you can think of. I don’t care about that — but if I were one of your clients who had taken your advice to sculpt PageRank — and if you had not come back to me and advised me to take down the “nofollow” attributes — I’d be suing you right now.

I’m not advising anyone to file lawsuits against PageRank Sculpting SEO companies (lawsuits are expensive AND the courts don’t understand this stuff at all) — but this kind of repeat bad behavior is what leads to lawsuits and legislation. The SEO community needs to get out of the PageRank Sculpting business as soon as possible. It IS a scam. I want nothing to do with it.

No one in this industry has any excuse for promoting such a clearly debunked and discredited technique. To ALL SEOs who advocate sculpting PageRank I say: Swallow your pride, get over it, and shut up when you feel the urge to talk about “sculpting PageRank”. You cannot do it, you don’t know how to do it, and you have no business telling anyone else to do it.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the views or opinions of any other person, party, or entity.